Thousands of Palestinians gathered in Ramallah Wednesday to bid farewell to their most famous poet and the author of their declaration of independence.

Mahmoud Darwish died at a United States hospital on Friday following open heart surgery. He was 67.

His coffin arrived in a Jordanian helicopter from Amman at the headquarters of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, where, wrapped in a Palestinian flag and covered with flowers, it was carried along a red carpet as a Palestinian honour guard stood at attention.

Abbas and other senior Palestinian officials received the coffin, which was later to be paraded on a military vehicle through the streets of Ramallah.

Darwish will then be laid to rest at a special burial place at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, sitting on a hill overlooking the vast terrain of the West Bank and nearby Jerusalem.

Darwish had asked to be buried at that location, having dedicated his life to culture, poetry and literature.

He was born in a village near Acre in 1941 in what was then the British League of Nations mandate of historic Palestine.

He and his family fled the village during the first Arab-Israeli War, which erupted as Israel was founded in May 1948.

The family briefly stayed in Lebanon, before returning to the nascent Israeli state, where they settled in the northern Israeli Galilee region after finding their village destroyed.

In the mid-1970s, Darwish, who was a political activist and imprisoned several times by Israel, left to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon.

In 1988, Darwish wrote the Palestinian declaration of independence, which then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat read in Algiers to announce the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A member of the PLO's Executive Committee, he resigned in 1993 to concentrate on writing poetry.

His poems are memorized by students throughout the Arab world and used as lyrics for songs by famous Arab singers.